THE FOREVER THING INTERLUDE 3
aka Transient Nature
by maven
STANDARD DISCLAIMER: Constant c Productions and Amblin Television in association with Warner Bros. Television, NBC and probably a slew of other people have prior claim. Anyone you don't recognize comes from my imagination.
RATINGS DISCLAIMER: Sex = a same sex relationship but otherwise PG, Violence = PG, Language = PG.
CONTINUITY DISCLAIMER: To be precise canon up to Rampage and then alternative universe. This is a segment of the Thing-verse, a chronological list can be found at the site.
BLAME DISCLAIMER: Sharon Bowers. I didn’t even watch the damn show until she started writing it.
FEEDBACK, COMMENTS AND FLAMES: Email at maven369@sympatico.ca
It’s strange. For me, the fall has always represented the renewal usually associated with spring. Maybe it’s because, for me, all the significant events of my life happened in the autumn. The Weavers adopting me, the first move to Africa, the return to the States to begin my formal education and my admittance to medical school. Starting at County. Meeting Kim four years ago and our first stumbling steps together. Picking ourselves up and starting anew three years ago.
But this autumn is different. Now the changing leaves and the grass dying around me is simply that, death. Not some great cosmic cycle of rebirth, some manifestation of the mystery of nature or a turn in the circle of life.
She’d been collecting Disney videos for the last few years from on-line or yard sales or at the pre-viewed section of our video store. She hadn’t told me because it was to be a surprise. It came to light one day when Abby returned from school and found her in the downstairs storage closet with an empty box and a hammer, surrounded by a sea of smashed black plastic and magnetic ribbon. They were still there when I got home two hours later, huddled in the corner, faces ravished by tears. She had just looked at me, expression growing still and closed, before going upstairs. I’d pressed my palms into the shards, giving myself an excuse to cry, as Abby and I cleaned up the remains.
And then, like so many things over the last two months, it was never mentioned again.
I wonder if it was a good thing that we hadn’t settled on a name. It meant that the marker only had the date and a single word. Not a name but a designation and not a particularly accurate one at that.
No, that’s doing them a disservice. I know that they wouldn’t have understood about Kim and myself, at least, not easily or quickly. But a child, they always said, should be conceived and raised in love.
God knows this one was. The idea conceived with laughter and love, the desire to create and raise and have something that was living and ours. Our gesture of a belief in the future. Our attempt at immorality.
Our child.
No one has asked but you can see the question behind their eyes and hovering on their lips, a question that they, and I, are afraid to ask her. if I ask and the answer is no then a part of me dies. If I ask and the answer is yes then the fear of “what if” will take me.
And I never ask a question that I don’t want to know the answer to.
Perhaps that makes me a coward.
It’s cold. Unseasonably they say with a cold snap that has killed all hope of an Indian summer this year. Perhaps it is hubris but the weather matches the mood of the house. Hubris and comfort that nature mourns with us.
I suppose the cold started that day but I noticed it for the first time the day I brought her home. She wouldn’t go upstairs, fearing the nursery door, and so we spent the first few days on the couch with Abby tiptoeing between her basement apartment and the kitchen. For three days. And then Abby had opened all the blinds allowing the cold light in. Browbeating Kim into dressing and me into returning to work.
I didn’t know if I should have kissed her or killed her. I still don’t.
My parents, according to my memory and that of their friends, had a long and happy marriage. Not without problems and strife but still a success by all accounts. Their lives could be measured together, from their birth in the same small town in the same year to their death together. I mourn them but am also glad that neither had to learn to live alone, to be the survivor.
I pray I never have to be alone again, to be the survivor. Again I wonder if that makes me a coward.
In my pocket is a ring. It’s in a small white envelope made of some stiff synthetic material that conceals the contents. It’s a plain, gold band inscribed with the day we met, a hyphen and then the infinity sign. I always thought it was a sappy sentiment when I saw my mother’s but one I wanted to copy when I eventually married. A tradition to pass on. I was waiting for the perfect time and thinking that a better one was coming up. Such as the decision of have a child and then the conception and then the birth. It became the perfect time to give a symbol of eternity and commitment on the birth of our eternity.
The sun is setting and I should head home soon. They’ll be waiting. Kim in the living room not watching the television, not listening to the stereo. Abby will be close to her, ready to listen or talk or hold her while she cries. Their friendship has deepened, a bond that has developed between them over the last two months. She hasn’t talked to me about what happened, hasn’t cried or even acknowledged it yet, only to Abby. Only recently has she allowed me to occasionally hold her through the night, no longer merely bearing my touch until she thought I was asleep and then extracting herself to the far edge of the bed. Or from our room altogether.
Part of me is jealous that it’s Abby that Kim turns to in grief, that with Abby she can cry or talk. A large part of me is relieved that she has someone she can turn to. A small part of me considers the risk of this bond between them extending beyond the emotional and into the physical. But there is relief there too, because if it were to happen then Kim would perhaps find the spark of joy in the act. Because God knows she doesn’t find it with me. Our one attempt brought neither comfort nor succour. Perhaps because it hadn’t been making love but rather us blindly seeking oblivion. It had been a failure that left me unwilling to either encourage or desire an encore.
Some nights she leaves me, the bed, the room and goes downstairs. When she does I bury my head deeper under my pillow and hum in the hope that the noise and feathers will mean I don't hear the opening of the basement door. Always, in the morning, I find her asleep, lying on the couch in front of the blue flickering screen of the television.
Now I know I’m a coward.
My parents told me once that they tried to conceive a child for years and that they had accepted it as God’s will that their love would go to a child not born of them. Someone who needed parents as much as they needed a child. Me, in other words. My mother once told me that it had preyed on them, each trying to not assign blame for the failure, and that it was the only time she had feared for her marriage. Strangely, I don’t have the same fear. Because lately, I've seen something new in her eyes. Or something old returned. As if they, and she, wanted to talk to me. New born optimist that I am I stake my sanity that she's seeking words to build a bridge across this chasm.
Our relationship has been battered, now and in the past, by others and by ourselves, by calculated actions and by acts of God. We’ve survived. We will survive. And when I doubt it I remember Kim’s words about the Phoenix. And pray that some day Kim will be able to contemplate new life from these ashes as well.
I say goodnight to my parents, ask them to look after my daughter.
And I go home.
The End
Next story in the Thing-verse: The Door at the Bottom of the Stairs
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